If you’re not a developer and you've heard of GitHub at all, you probably only know it as an online space where developers work together on coding projects—one that's only useful to the geekiest sector of the population.

But GitHub is actually an incredibly useful tool that could be used to organize any group project online. And the day that “regular” people begin adopting it is closer than you think.

On Wednesday, GitHub CEO Tom Preston-Werner said normals are welcome to join the party. “We want to make [non-development] use cases possible,” he said at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2013 conference. “Now, we still optimize GitHub for software developers. This is something that’s very important to us. Software is the future of the world.”

With a lackluster welcome like that, you could be forgiven for not rushing to sign up for an account right this instant. From a technical standpoint, though, GitHub isn’t at all specific to code projects. It’s open to anyone. If only GitHub made more of an effort to make those others feel more welcome.

The World Outside Of Code

When you sign up for GitHub, the first thing you do is built an online repository, or "repo"—a storage locker for your current project. You can tuck away any kind of files, from code scripts to blueprints to text documents. You and other collaborators work on these files locally, then upload—or “push”—them to the online repository, logging changes as you do so.

That way, everyone in the group can see the latest changes to these files, plus each file’s entire change history. This is called version control.

Usually on GitHub, this sort of project focuses on coding a program or building a website. But it doesn’t have to. Imagine a team of lawyers researching a case and using GitHub to upload and annotate legal documents. Or co-authors writing and editing chapters of a book. Or even an online brainstorming session on GitHub, which would be stored and documented far more efficiently than a mess of flustered emails ever could be.

Even better, GitHub is especially good at making sure you and your collaborators retain sole ownership of your projects. (See Section F of the Terms of Service.) Plus, while GitHub is lauded for promoting open source, you don’t have to make your own repositories public.

GitHub For Knowledge Workers

On GitHub’s official YouTube channel, trainer Matthew McCullough explains that the tool can be useful for anyone who is considered a “knowledge worker.” A knowledge worker could be a researcher, designer, editor, inventor, creator, or anyone who is involved with creating, editing, or handling information. (Including developers, of course.)

According to Preston-Werner, the problem is the site's forbiddingly technical approach. “We’ve got a lot of educating to do,” he said. GitHub is built on top of Git, an eight-year-old source-code management tool that most users still manage via a command- line interface, like movie hackers from the 1990s.

While technology is certainly a hurdle, it’s not that bad. There are plenty of free tools for learning Git online. Don’t want to bother? No problem. GitHub comes with graphical interface tools that you can download and use without knowing a line of Git.

Invite The Non-Geeks

The biggest hurdle to broader GitHub adoption might just be its belief that geeks come first. Preston-Werner is fine with non-geeks using the service, but he’s not going to roll out the red carpet for them. He just wants it to be “possible.”

During the discussion, Preston-Werner acknowledged that GitHub is not currently a profitable company. While he didn’t say if profitability is his end goal, I have just the idea to introduce an influx of new adopters to this useful but misunderstood tool—market it as something for everyone.

Email, instant messaging, forums, code forges and other collaboration tools make it possible for distributed teams to get work done - but they're not great tools for making decisions. The team behind Loomio wants to solve that with a new Web-based tool for focused, concise discussions that allow all team members to be heard.

If you've ever worked with a distributed team, you know how difficult it can be to make decisions as a group. Discussions are unstructured, rambling affairs with dozens of messages flying about and no good way to track consensus. Even worse, requests for feedback can go without comment entirely, or with only a few stakeholders raising a voice.

Agree, Disagree, Abstain, Block

Discussion in Loomio starts with a discussion and specific proposal, and members have the option of voting on the proposal. A group can define the options (defaults are yes/no, abstain and block), and each member can give their view summary. As votes are tallied, everyone can see get a chart that shows how many folks are in agreement, how many aren't, how many have abstained, etc.

This sounds pretty simple, but most of today's collaboration tools don't provide a good way to focus a discussion. The key to Loomio is that it provides a central tool for discussions and (if used properly) narrows things down to decisions that are easy to vote on. Central is key here. It helps a lot to confine activity to one tool rather than making users look all over for information.

A lot of online teams communicate in several ways, including email, IM, IRC, over the phone and face to face. Stakeholders who prefer one medium (like email) lose out if discussions are held in IRC, or vice-versa. Even worse, stakeholders may be totally unaware a decision is being made at all. If a group settles on Loomio, it would enable the group to say "decisions are made here and nowhere else." If something isn't put up in Loomio (or another approved tool), then a decision wouldn't be legitimate.

Settling on a decision tool like Loomio should also help cut down on noise in other communication channels. It's popular to have discussions in email and CC everyone who might have an opinion or might need to vote on something. An active team can inspire email fatigue pretty quickly with discussions that are neverending. Loomio would allow users to visit, vote and get back to work.

Actually, Loomio isn't only for distributed teams. There's no reason it couldn't be used in any organization, but its especially appropriate for situations where team members or stakeholders are far-flung.

Can Loomio Solve the Problem?

Like any tool, Loomio would only be effective if used properly. The early design could probably do with some modification - a more obvious start and end date for votes, for example - but the initial design is solid. The Loomio team says it's already in use by some organizations. New Zealand companies or organizations like Enspiral and BuckyBox are among the first adopters - though no one seems to be providing a public instance that we can point to.

If you want to help, the group is looking for contributions from Ruby on Rails developers, as well as a little extra cash (NZ $5,000) to help the volunteer team devote more time to Loomio development. The project is sort-of open source and already on GitHub. It's "sort-of" open source because the site says it's open source, but if you look at the license text on GitHub it's basically a stump saying: "We need to add the license. GPLv2?" The pledge drive (through the Pledge Me platform) ends on May 18th. The developers have already raised more than their target, but more money might mean more time spent on development.

If adopted a bit more widely, Loomio might help take distributed teams to a new level - much like GitHub has helped with development. It is a simple concept, but bringing order to decision-making could help teams communicate better and make better decisions, no matter where they happen to be located.

Most startups fail. Nine out of 10 never amount to anything more than fond memories and a forgotten Facebook page. One reason is that they often lack a clear picture of exactly how they’re doing until it’s too late. But there are tools designed to help you assess your startup's progress compared to similar companies.

The best way for startup founders to improve their chance of success is by learning to make better decisions. But if you want to make better decisions, you need better data. And that’s where Startup Compass comes in: It’s designed to help you benchmark your startup’s performance against thousands of others to identify what you’re doing right and what you need to improve.

Startup Compass collects data from tens of thousands of startups around the world. It collects lots of data, then creates best practices, recommendations and benchmarks to help entrepreneurs make better product and business decisions.

Big Data for Small Companies

“This is a big-data approach to startup success,” says Startup Compass co-founder and serial entrepreneur Bjoern Lasse Herrmann. “Big companies have analysts to make sense of their data, and executives can make decisions based on that data. But startups don’t have any access to that kind of analytics. We wanted to put analysts in the cloud for startups.”

“Startups can learn three key things,” Herrmann says. “First, which key performance indicators actually matter. Most startups don’t even know which KPIs they should track or why they should track them. Second, they learn how their KPIs compare to other companies’ KPIs so they will know if they’re on the right track. See, for example, their customer acquisition costs. The third thing they learn is what actions they need to be taking. We help businesses take the next steps.”

Startup Compass calls its approach “cracking the code of innovation.” We call it “how not to kill your startup.”

The 5 don'ts

The real value of Startup Compass is comparing your company to others like it, but Startup Compass also summarizes its findings in its Startup Genome report. Here are nuggets of wisdom from the first Startup Genome report, five things not to do:

1. Don’t scale too early. This is the No. 1 cause of startup failure. Startup Compass has found that 70% of startups crash because they scale prematurely.

2. Don’t work part time. Sleepy? Get used to it. People who work full time on their startups raise an average of 24 times more funding than those who work part time.

3. Don’t go it alone. Maybe you are the smartest guy in the room. But solo founders raise less than half the money that two to three co-founders raise.

5. Don’t forget about the technology. Startups without a tech-oriented co-founder are twice as likely to scale prematurely and have three to five times less user growth.

If you want advice on an ongoing basis, you can join Startup Compass and in exchange for data on your startup, the company will benchmark your startup monthly, comparing you to similar outfits, so you can keep your priorities in line.

Startup Compass has 17,000 companies now using the service for things like checking whether their churn rate is too high or their retention rate is too low - or if they should be spending more money on customer acquisition.

“We have a number of companies that have gone through the process and tell us they used our product and realized they were falling behind on this or that metric and were able to fix those things and adjust accordingly. As a result they were better able to acquire customers in the long run and didn’t waste more money on things that were not productive.”

Companies everywhere pay for Microsoft's collaboration and document management service SharePoint, but research and anecdote both indicate that a lot of people dislike using it. What if using SharePoint was fun, though? Imagine all the money invested that would feel more worthwhile and all the collaborative work that could be done.

That's the theory behind a new product announced tonight from Mindjet, a nearly two decade old company that is best known for its mind mapping software but is extending itself into a larger corporate collaboration market. The company's new product, Mindjet SP, is a Mindjet plug-in for SharePoint - it takes SharePoint document trees and collaboration and displays them in mind map format. As mind maps go, Mindjet looks good (the company's free iPad app is a joy to use) - but not everyone loves mind maps in general. Can Mindjet save your company's SharePoint investment?

Mind mapping is an interesting practice. It's a method of using visual representations of interconnected concepts to explore non-linear relationships between things. It can be great for helping you think of details in a big complicated situation that you might not have thought of, or been able to write down the context for effectively, in a linear list.

Mind mapping is very popular in Japan, where systems thinking and design are given great respect. The paradigm is also often appreciated by fans of Neuro-linguistic programming, another controversial but also widely appreciated movement.

There's something that can feel a little hokey about mind mapping too, though. On the most benign end of the spectrum, it can be hard to remember to do. I know I like it when I remember to do it but only sit down and think things out that way a handful of times each year. On the other end of the spectrum, it can sometimes feel like mind mapping is a cult. Sometimes when you really like your mind map hammer, everything in life can look like a mind map nail.

Complicating the situation is the connection between mind mapping, and Mindjet in particular, and a man named Tony Buzan. Buzan claims to have created mind mapping and is a very charismatic figure. He's got his own mind mapping app and is a frequent lecturer and author. Mind mapping is cool and I do believe that it could be useful in helping expand and strengthen the brain, but there's something about this man that makes me more sympathetic to his critics than I feel towards him. Mind mapping is cool but Tony Buzan seems at high risk of being obnoxious. Maybe it's his absolute statements more than anything else. He does tell a good story, though. Here's Buzan's explanation of mind mapping, wrapped in an infomercial.

Mindjet's interface looks a lot like Buzan's and the company makes mention of him occasionally in passing around its website. It would be nice, I think, if Mindjet's organic interface view was more loosey-goosey like Buzan's.

None the less, Mindjet has almost 2 million users of its software. There is a free version, but paid versions have ranged from $20 per month up to $160 per month for up to ten users. It's a strong business and recently acquired collaberation management web app Cohuman, a startup with a beautiful interface that companies willing to use the public cloud can use in conjunction with Mindjet mind maps. Those two technologies will be much closer integrated in the near future, the company said last week.

Most companies will still prefer to store and share their documents and other files on the private cloud behind firewalls. While critics of Microsoft are abundant, Mindjet believes that Microsoft is going to be a very important part of the enterprise for a long time. The mind mapping and collaboration company believes there's plenty of opportunity to focus on helping companies get the most out of Microsoft software.

Mindjet SP is an intriguing offering - can traditional or inhospitable interfaces be made more lovable through interpretation into a mind map format? Mind mapping always seems like an idea with great potential. Maybe a use case like this is what will make it finally catch on.

Disqus is quietly testing an interface that allows site owners to rank and give credentials and labels to their commenters. The feature takes advantage of a trend towards being able to find experts through social search.

The project is called Disqus Ranks, and it should be rolling out shortly. Disqus did not return a request for information about the timing of the rollout.

The commenting features mimic those already used internally by bigger publishers, who evaluate a user's influence by assigning badges to confirm to the network and community some measure of a commenter's significance.

Community managers who don't have their own custom-made evaluation systems will love this, because it provides them an easy-to-use social ranking system in plug-n-play format. Once the beta is released, it will show up in the interface as another feature in the menu list.

The site owner or manager can use a preferences list to calibrate from "most important" to "least important" the weight that each of a certain type of interaction has on the network or the blog.

Then, he can create custom titles for each of those qualifications and assign them to users. At Fred Wilson's blog, AVC, for example, Wilson is going with a bar theme and assigning himself the title of bartender. He assigns different types of users other titles, like regular, or semi-regular, depending on how often they visit the site and how often they leave a comment.

The new features would be an improvement over straight-up commenting, especially since social search and discovery seems to be a huge trend developing Web communities. It's no longer enough for a site manager or a publisher to make commenting available to build the community. The new move seems to be towards being able to identify experts within the blog or the network.

The intelligence community is inputting data to the Web at an amazing rate. That mountain of data can be overwhelming to mere humans who are trying to read through pages and pages of information to pinpoint exactly what they're after. Mark Rutherford of CNET News reports that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has hired a tech company to develop a reader that will scour the Web and render certain information and knowledge into a form that is more easily digested and usable.

BBN Technologies was recently awarded a $29.7 million contract to develop a universal text engine that will capture intelligence and render it usable to humans as well as artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Officially called the Machine Reading Program, this new system will "automatically monitor the technological and political activities of nation states and transnational organizations - which could mean everything from al-Qaeda to the U.N." for the US military. BBN expects there may also be many useful civilian applications for its new reader. The company has also developed a real-time audio stream called the the BBN Broadcast Monitoring System that automatically transcribes real-time audio streams and translates them into English.

With this new project, BBN hopes to "develop techniques that can generalize across the linguistic structure and content of diverse documents to extract relations and axioms directly from text rather than relying on a knowledge engineer to encode such information." Here's how it will work:

Although it is not immediately clear when (or if) this new machine reader will be available to civilians, we are certainly looking forward to trying something like this out. Some paranoid types will believe this is nothing more than "the man" trying to spy on us, but those people need to realize everything we do online is being watched by someone. If you are really concerned about your online privacy you should secure important data on your computer, call your government leaders and try to change privacy laws, or stay off the Web altogether.

Researchers, medical professionals, consumers, students and others are all likely to benefit from such an application. Not having to spend unnecessary time searching through mountains of information on the Web for something relevant makes life easier and allows us to be more productive.

The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit entity behind the immensely popular Wikipedia, just announced a new project that is meant to make it a lot easier for inexperienced authors to contribute articles and edits to the project. To do this, the Wikimedia Foundation just received a $890,000 grant from the Stanton Foundation. The project will focus on making the user interface for editing and writing Wikipedia articles easier to use for less tech-savvy contributors.

While there are already numerous browser extensions that try make editing Wikipedia articles easier, the default interface and markup language of the Wikipedia can be quite intimidating for first time users.

Helping First-Time Authors

As Sue Gardner, the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, points out in the announcement, most of the current Wikipedia authors have a "moderate-to-high level of technical understanding." This, however, excludes a large number of potential contributors who aren't very tech savvy, but would like to participate in the project.

The Wikimedia Foundation will use this grant to create a team of developers and user interface designers that will work on reducing barriers of entry for first-time authors. Specifically, the team will look at hiding the more complex elements of the user interface from users who don't need to deal with them.

To us, this seems like a worthwhile project. Anybody who has looked at the markup language for the Wikipedia knows that is anything but intuitive and that there is quite a learning curve involved before one can start to contribute anything more than simple edits. Reducing these barriers of entry will allow a whole new group of users to contribute their knowledge to the project.

Most people quickly answer this question in the affirmative. I certainly do. However, there are people out there who aren't sure. They look at the monthly cost of a SaaS application and compare it to the equivalent licensed product over an extended period of time. Given enough time, you will eventually hit a point when the SaaS product appears to be more expensive. Let's look at it from the perspective of the total cost of ownership (TCO).

The true cost of a licensed product is much higher than just the software. Here are other things to factor in:

Hardware costs: You have to either buy machines or add your software to existing servers and manage them. If it is a mission-critical application, you will probably need dedicated machines and back-ups.

Additional software costs: You will most likely need an OS, application server software, a database, monitoring software, etc. Many of these products are open source now, but there are still associated costs.

Implementation costs: In my experience, the implementation costs associated with a behind-the-firewall solution are always higher than those of a SaaS application. There is simply more to do. You will either pay consultants or use your own valuable resources and time to worry about installing software, integrating it, building servers, configuration, etc.

Maintenance labor: If you have in-house software, there is going to be some level of effort required to keep it happy. Your IT people will need to take care of it, which will keep them from doing more value-added activities.

Another huge factor here is the ability to get the latest and greatest technology. Once you install software in a data center, it becomes more difficult to upgrade and maintain it (especially if you customize it). In such a case, you will be stuck with old software that you will have to replace in the same time frame described above. In other words, unless you are absolutely sure, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that your licensed software is going to meet your business needs for 5 years or more, then SaaS might make financial sense.

Let's look at a real-world example. A 100-person company has been sharing files via email and internal servers. The executives have finally concluded they need to join the 21st century and put a solution in place. One option is to implement SharePoint. Here is a rough estimate of what that might cost:

It would take over 4 and a half years before the licensed software became cheaper. By that time, I'm quite sure there would be another solution that could replace SharePoint, and the cycle would start again. We can quibble about the numbers, but you get the point. Plus, the numbers don't reflect that the SaaS solution is likely to improve and innovate faster than the licensed software by a significant amount.

What do you think? Have you done this analysis, and what did you conclude?

I recently did a dump of content from my PDA to my
linkblog - things I'd been reading offline and not yet recorded in my 'Ideas
Database' (aka my linkblog). One batch of links is from a single person, Bill Ives. So I
thought I'd dump them into one R/WW post - more for my benefit than anything else.

All these links are from his Trends:
KM/Portals category, which I read specifically for the posts on KM storytelling:

(quoting Steve Denning) "Storytelling
doesn’t replace analytical thinking. It supplements it by enabling us to imagine
new perspectives and new worlds, and is ideally suited to communicating change and
stimulating innovation."

"I have found the key differentiator in KM success to be the quality of leadership and
not the quality of KM solution design or technology. I have seen implementations with
acceptable designs flourish under the right leadership and brilliant "next generation" KM
designs flounder under poor leadership."

"To make knowledge collection and knowledge sharing more effective, one must go beyond
simply abstracting documents from explicit knowledge sources. It is necessary to provide
a story of the document."

Which again, is where blogs come in according to Bill.

e) In Part 5, Enhancing
Learning, Bill explains the benefits of stories as a learning device:

"The story contains much more than a series of basic procedural steps. It can contain
the rationale, the strategy and the cultural values implicit within the actions taken by
the story teller."

f) In a later series called "KM Stories", Bill writes about specific case studies. In
Part
Two he says:

"For knowledge management to be successful, IT, HR, and the business units need to
work together to achieve success."

g) In his postscript
to that series, Bill lists the factors for successful KM projects. I won't re-list them
all here, but suffice to say (for me) that the first two are people-related factors:

"Gain and Enlist Top Down Support to Overcome Turf Issues

Provide Strong Leadership for the Knowledge Function"

I suspect that's why KM projects are so wont to fail. When you require the support of
lots of different people and a strong leader, well that's Politics - not technology. And we all know how contentious politics can be!

Thanks to Bill Ives for writing so much valuable content on the subject of KM and
storytelling. I hope to read more soon.

After my Dave Snowden grokking last week, I've been reading up on storytelling in KM. Bill Ives has some fantastic reading on this subject and I intend to read Steve Denning too. I was thinking this morning about how people have different niches and specialist talents. For example, I'm a better writer than I am a programmer or designer. And there are a lot of people who are better programmers or designers than writers. Or better talkers than writers. Or better artists than talkers.

I've always maintained that blogging isn't for everyone and that applies inside corporate walls too. Blogs and wikis are not going to suit everyone in an organisation, so they're not the perfect KM solution by any means. One way around this is to look for those 1 or 2 people in a team or group who are natural writers or have an interest in Web writing - and encourage those people to take responsibility for their team's content. This is also the approach most companies take when running their Content Management Systems.

But I was thinking about an alternative approach. What if organisations hired a specialist writer, whose job it is to go around the different teams and elicit stories from people. That person would be a kind of journalist (but forget about the whole "are bloggers journalists" debate, that's not important). The person I'm describing would interview team members and coax stories from them. Those stories would then be transcribed onto a team weblog - with all team members encouraged to comment on or add to the stories. The point is that there needs to be at least one person who knows how to spin a narrativeÖ write compelling content.

Once that narrative is "up there" on the blog - it acts as a springboard for the non-writers to contribute bits of content, eventually adding up to a store of knowledge about the organisation. Think of the writer's narrative as a star, with the resulting contributions being planets that are created around the gravitational pull and life-giving energy of the star.

Just as there are specialist programmers and designers on Web teams, I think there is a need for specialist writers or storytellers to act as a Knowledge Management nexus for organisations. This is an idea I'm exploring for a business - where I set myself up as a consultant KM StoryWriter.

And yes it uses the same skillset that I'd need to write a biography of Web 2.0. I guess I'm exploring ways to fulfil my ambition to write stories for a living. The future of fiction is non-fiction - there's very little market for novelists these days. I think there is a market for non-fiction stories - for example in the form of non-fiction books, or as a Knowledge Management tool in organisations. I feel I'm getting closer to finding my nicheÖ

This post could be sub-titled "Grokking Dave Snowden", because that's how I felt after
reading this PDF file from AOK
(Association of Knowledgework). The PDF features extracts from a proposed AOK book entitled Stars Of The
New Order: What They're Telling Business Leaders. The chapter that got my attention
was chapter 13: Third Generation Knowledge Management. I think it's based on a series of
conversations with Dave
Snowden back in January 2002, but the content is just as relevant now.

Snowden is
like the Jakob Nielsen of Knowledge Management - he's
a very influential figure in the community. In these conversations, he held sway with
other KM practitioners like Jack Vinson and James Robertson. This discussion format
brought out the best in Snowden I believe. Here are some of the highlights I picked
out and my thoughts based on them.

Ecology

In recent years, it's been difficult to pin down a definition of what Knowledge
Management is. What it appeared to be in the 90's was Information Management in wolf's
clothing. Or is that: mutton dressed as lamb? :-) Either way, what was being 'managed' in
the 90's by so-called Knowledge Management Systems was not in fact knowledge - but
information. There was, as T.D.
Wilson put it:

"A tendency to elide the distinction between 'knowledge' (what I know)
and 'information' (what I am able to convey about what I know)."

In the conversations, Dave Snowden put it like this:

"As we move into the third millennium we see a new approach emerging in
which we focus not on the management of knowledge as a 'thing' which can be identified
and cataloged, but on the management of the ecology of knowledge." (pg 21)

I love that term: ecology of knowledge. It emphasizes that knowledge is a fluid,
almost living, thing; and that it's closely related to its environment - or put another
way, its context (a word which Snowden uses a lot).

Head, Mouth, Hands

Snowden went on to explain a basic principle of KM in this 'ecology' view of it:

"The process of moving from my head, to my mouth to my hands inevitably
involves some loss of content, and frequently involves a massive loss of context." (pg
21)

Which is to say: during the act of speaking and then writing what is in your head, you
will probably lose some content and a lot of context.

To extrapolate from what Snowden said, this is how I think his body metaphor works
out:

Head = Context
Mouth = Narrative
Hands = Content Management

The Role of Narrative

"...as for strategy, I use narrative techniques to contextualize the
model for a company so the heuristics and boundary conditions are defined not in some
abstract language, but are rooted in the defining stories of that organization." (pg
24)

This is of great interest to me. As a writer, narrative is one of my skillsets. So I'm
thinking this could be a way for me to leverage my skills as a writer in the world of KM
(see, I'm even using the word 'leverage' with gay abandon now - I'm drinking the KM
Kool-Aid!).

You know what it also reminds me of? My two favourite contemporary literary writers,
Michael Lewis and Tom Wolfe. They are both pioneers of writing non-fiction using literary
techniques. I was thinking about this the other day (in another context!) and wrote down this as a note to myself:
The future of fiction is non-fiction.

To relate this to KM, I think there's room for a literary sensibility in business
too.

Narrative Context

Snowden talked about rejecting "generic models" of knowledge management - typified by
KM Consultants who speak in buzz words and cliches. He explained:

"If a model is rooted in the stories of an organization’s
histories and its possible futures (narrative techniques) then the model has meaning to
that group. My approach is to get the organization to tell stories and then to populate a
framework with those stories, draw boundaries between spaces and then move forward to
action." (pg 26)

He hates "consultants who just roll out their model regardless of context".

Be a Chef, not a Recipe Book User

The approach Snowden prefers is what he labels a "heuristic" one - heuristic meaning to discover or find
out. He has a lovely metaphor to explain this:

"Here we have the chef, not the recipe book user, with all the
differences in quality that metaphor implies." (pg 27)

The best chefs are artists, so this view of KM plays to my artsy-fartsy nature :-)

KM is...

So after all that, what is KM? Well Snowden defined it as "the creation of shared
context". He said knowledge must be volunteered (not conscripted), which is where the
narrative techniques come in. When people tell their own stories, they naturally put
information into the context of their lives.

Not coincidentally that is also the pattern
of blogging, which encourages people to tell their stories on the Web and "share context"
with their particular community. The blogging communities for Web Design and Knowledge
Management itself best illustrate this to me - they both have strong communities where
bloggers constantly comment on each others sites or trackback one another.

Snowden's own KM model is called Cynefin and he
described it like this:

"...the contextualization takes the form of gathering anecdotes
(naturally told stories, around the water cooler etc.) from that organization’s own
history, and using those stories to create the [KM] model." (pg 29)

He later referred to this as mapping what people know, using narrative techniques (pg
33).

As yet, I'm not sure what role literary techniques might play in this. I'll read some
more on Snowden's theories, plus other peoples, and see what I can come up with.

I'd like
to think that a skilled writer has a lot to offer in the KM process of transcribing peoples
stories into a compelling narrative. Just as Michael Lewis wrote an amazing narrative
based on the stories of the Oakland A's baseball team in his book
Moneyball (which I've just finished reading). The stories came from the Oakland A's
people, particularly Billy Beane. But it was Lewis' skill that stitched it all together
to produce a very insightful book - chock full of knowledge, in fact.

I've crossed oceans of time to find you...

Lastly, Snowden defined the generations of Knowledge Management as he sees them:

"In Generation 3, we acknowledge Gen 2 (content management) but also see
knowledge is simultaneously a flow and a thing—so for the flows we manage
channels." (pg 37)

"We are chefs using prior knowledge, experience and natural talent to
create original solutions, not recipe book users." (pg 37/38)

I like to think that describes the art of writing too. And originality is something I
place a high premium on, so I have a feeling Dave Snowden's theories on Knowledge
Management are going to serve me very well.

There's an interesting meme doing the rounds about using pens as a metaphor for
weblogs. Of course I can't resist adding my 2 cents when it comes to that topic
:-) Lilia began with a
post that explored the 'weblog as a pen' metaphor in relation to how weblogs serve
many purposes - like pens do. This was as a reaction to the 'weblog as genre' discussion
going on elsewhere. She ended up concluding that a weblog is not like a pen, "but
blogging software is." That is, a pen is a tool - just like blogging software. Dina picked up on that
theme and took the following path:

'weblog as a pen' ---> pen as a genre ---> pen as the creative
potential in relationships ---> pen as a metaphor ---> (metaphors in general)
---> the future of the pen with Gen Y.

My contribution to this meme, like Dina's, takes a detour from Lilia's main point (but
then that is what's fun about the social aspect of blogging - people pick up a post from
someone else and use it as a springboard for their own ideas). So here's my riff on the
'pen as metaphor' theme.

Being John Baldessari

I have an image in the top-left of my homepage, borrowed from a photo of a John
Baldessari artwork called Read/Write/Think/Dream - in which
he transformed the facade and interior foyer of the Geisel Library at the University of
California, San Diego, into a colourful and interactive work of art. (nb: I wrote about it a month and a
half ago). The whole artwork resonated deeply with me, but that sliver of an image you
see in the top-left of your screen (you have to get out of your RSS Reader to see it!)
seemed to 'fit' with the themes of my weblog. I hadn't really analysed why, until
today.

People are central

It's a photo-mural of pens and pencils and it's just one part of the
Read/Write/Think/Dream artwork. The image shows two people looking at the pencils and
pens - one has stopped to look, the other is about to walk past it. Those people (and the
ones who will follow) are just as much a part of the artwork as the
pencils/pens.

Baldessari said
about the work: "The whole concept of the piece deals with the obvious: students are
central to the university." To relate this to how I used that one image on my weblog: my
readers (people) are just as much a part of my blog as my writing. To extend that even
further: people are central to the blogosphere.

Order and Ideas

What's not immediately obvious in the Read/Write/Think/Dream artwork is that the pens
and pencils are ordered
according to the color spectrum of the rainbow. Here is one explanation of
this:

"On one interior side wall is a photo-mural of pens and pencils in a
neat row, each a different color, aligned according to their sequence in the color
spectrum. These tools, neatly ordered, and the students, gathered in a row like carefully
collected types, reflect Baldessari's deep-seated interest in sorting and systems of
organization." (emphasis mine)

Once again, I can apply this meaning to my blog. These days I style myself as an Analyst, which is my way of
saying that in this weblog I strive to examine and organize information - and from that
create new ideas.

People + Tools =

Baldessari also said that "the pens and pencils represent the tools of the students'
trade". This gives me an opportunity to return to Lilia's original point that pens - and
weblog authoring systems - are just tools. We can use them how we like, but it comes back
to the sum of: Person + Tool = Self-Expression OR Creativity OR Knowledge OR Blogosphere
OR Etc.

Applying this to Knowledge Management

My point here is: we need both people and tools in the equation. And
thankfully, I think this is where the current Knowledge Management theories are heading.
As Mike Gotta
put it - "Knowledge Management: It Was Always About People".

The problem with KM
during the 90's was that everyone thought of Knowledge Management as being
Technology-driven. Companies tried to implement Knowledge Management
systems and tools. Well actually that theory wasn't total nonsense, because the reality is
KM is about both People and Tools. If you look at Dave Pollard's principles of KM (which I
found very inspirational), you'll see that it's a mix of tools and people-oriented
principles that he advocates.

I have a new catchphrase to express this: People are Central, but Tools are
Crucial.

Would you like fries with that segue?

So that's my take on the 'pen as metaphor' meme. Heh, I took a big segue! but I think I learned
something along the way ;-) However I didn't get to address Dina's point about "the
future of the pen with Gen Y" - which is a fascinating question. I'll think about that
some more and address it in a later post.

As a follow-up to my Reliance post yesterday, which was on the subject of my dependence on web servers, I read something by Mitch Kapor this morning that resonates (even though his post was from a different context):

"I think I've unfairly maligned servers in the past. It's not the server I dislike, it's the idea that as an end user I am disempowered if the work I want to do depends on the administration of a piece of software I don't control, can't get access to, and plays by a different set of rules. The PC-era pioneer in me says, "get rid of it". Another approach might be, "tame it and make it serve me".

Electricity comes out of the plug in the wall reliably (in the developed nations). Landline telephones have reliable dial tone. Why can't we have utility-level connectivity for user data? And why can't it be open source? This is a big, ambitious vision, and it's not just about servers per se, but operational reliability as an overall system function (think Google with its hundred thousand servers) but maybe there's something here. More on this later too."

There are a number of themes here that interest me. It's early in the day where I am and I haven't got my head around it all yet, but it's to do with: operational reliability, user empowerment on the Web, integration of the web system with one's person, control, "taming" computers, commoditization, and of course the old chestnut of browser-based apps vs desktop apps. This is a placeholder post, while I mull over it. If anybody has any relevant pointers or links, feel free to make a comment. p.s. isn't it interesting that when people discuss heavy themes like this, Google always comes up...

In my travels today I came across some articles about how Generation Y (people born in 1980's
or 1990's) use Information Technology. I'm a Generation X'er myself, so Generation Y has
always been something of a curiosity to me - as other generations always are, no matter
which part of the timeline you come from. The first article that caught my eye was from
an Australian IT magazine and it was about how Generation Y are much more prone to
forming communities than previous generations.
Here's an excerpt:

"Social researcher Hugh Mackay said yesterday that younger generations
were herding together like never before, using new technologies such as SMS and email
chatrooms to foster tight social bonds.

Having grown up knowing only "instability, uncertainty and
unpredictability", Generation Y had instinctively drawn together to cope, Mr Mackay said.
[...] "They are the most intensely tribal, herd-based generation of young Australians
I've ever known."

The words "tribal" and "herd-based" are words you wouldn't normally use to describe a
Generation X'er. We're mostly characterized as individualistic or selfish, lazy, and
cynical towards society. In some respects those attitudes were a backlash against the
flower-power idealism of the baby boomers, although I'm one of those who thinks
environment - or context - has a lot to do with the values and attitudes that a person or
group of people has. So Generation Y are both a product of the computerized environment
of the 1990's onward and are also rebelling against the "bite me" attitude of Gen
X by adopting a, well, a "hug me" attitude I suppose.

The aussie social researcher quoted above goes on to say:

"I'm not predicting a revolution but I think it's the early sign of a
genuine culture shift away from individualism to a more communitarian kind of
culture."

I'm not so sure that individualism is on the way out, because two-way web culture
promotes freedom of choice and individual creativity. But we definitely are seeing mass
market culture slowly but surely being replaced by niche markets - that is, small
communities of people based on shared topics of interest. Nowadays we increasingly have a
large collection of small communities (niches), rather than a small collection of large
communities (mass market).

btw doesn't "communitarian" sound eerily close to "communism"? or is that me being
cynical? ;-)

After reading the above article, I went searching for more and came across
this article from Chief Learning Officer magazine on how Knowledge Management should
cater to Generation Y. They concluded that Generation Y will expect the following 3
things from a KM system: real-time access, personalization, and
community. They state:

"By the end of this decade we will have moved from a workforce that
often has to be sold on e-learning to one that demands e-learning, knowledge management
and communities of practice."

Then I came across Dina Mehta's latest
post, about youth in
Urban India. I found this very interesting, particularly regarding youth's preference
for IM (Instant Messaging for you oldies) over email. Dina talks about:

"...an "always on" world which is facilitated by technology like
IM, VOIP, forums, blogs and online journals (have you ever left a comment at a youth
journal or blog - either at a specific post or on their guestboards, and noticed how very
promptly you will get a response to your comment - not just from the author but from a
whole host of readers ?), simple SMS to enhanced functions offered by new generation
mobile phones. How this is impacting and changing the way youth thinks,
communicates, and takes decisions. And the implications this might have
for the future as they enter the workplace, bringing in their new "culture-of-use", and for marketers seeking to address this segment."

As I read this it occured to me how the field of Knowledge Management is undergoing a
seachange right now. Knowledge Management has been a failure for Generation X from the
90's up till now and frankly most KM consultants haven't got a clue about the changes
coming in Generation Y. The very changes that Dina summarises so well.

People in the
blog world such as Dina know what's up, but if you look at professional KM articles elsewhere on the
Web it's the same old same old. They continue to witter on about "leveraging" or
"capturing" knowledge, how to uncover "tacit knowledge", and "optimizing operational
efficiency". Frankly that sort of mumbo-jumbo annoys the heck out of me, but unless you
talk that language you don't make any headway in the business world. If I look at
this in a positive way, maybe that's my "niche" to explore. Knowledge Management for the
21st century, two-way web style.

In other news, Mark
Bernstein wrote a good post today about the recent "bad behavior" of the blogosphere
(the MT pricing scandal and the weblogs.com kerfuffle). The best piece of advice in his
post was this:

"Slow down. Take the time to write well. Think things through.
Relax."

This was a follow-up to Mark's previous post, where
he said it would be preferable for people to respond to other bloggers in their own space
(weblog), rather than leave comments in another person's weblog:

"Weblog comments incite duels. Duels are bad for society. We should all
forego comments and return to carefully blogging responses -- including responses we
disagree with, but excluding responses we cannot tolerate."

It's interesting to note that Mark's advice seems to go against the grain of what
Generation Y does - frequent comments on other blogs, using IM to converse instantly and
in real time. So on the one hand Mark's advice is old-fashioned and out of touch with
what 'the kids' do these days. But on the other hand I agree that we should learn to take
deep breaths and compose thoughtful responses on our personal weblogs - instead of
engaging in knife-fights on someone else's territory.

Related to this topic, I've just
finished an experiment where I tried to publish a short and pithy post every day.
Off-the-kuff things. It didn't work for me though, as I'm more comfortable writing
long-form articles and pondering things before I post. But then I'm also more of an 'email' person than an
'IM' one. Perhaps there is a generation gap (I nearly said a 'disconnect', but that's a
loaded term in the Web world). Whereas Gen Y like to send messages to their tribes in
real-time, previous generations prefer to 'compose' their messages and 'publish' them
when they're good and ready. If that's the case, is RSS Time fast enough for
Gen Y's?

Knowledge Management is a term that many people dislike, myself included.
Firstly it's a misnomer - you can't "manage", at an organization or
corporate level, something as subjective and contextual as knowledge. It's even
debatable whether you can manage knowledge at a personal level - because
we don't always know what we know.

Secondly, the term 'knowledge management' has become one of those awful IT
cliche buzz words - like (my personal favourite) "leverage" and
"portal". People who want to sound important in IT business meetings,
but actually know little about IT, use buzz words frequently. e.g. "Yes we
are addressing that with our new Knowledge Management initiatives, which will
leverage off our Web Portal."

But despite these faults, the term 'knowledge management' is widely accepted
as the name of a business discipline (alongside 'accounting' and 'marketing' and
so forth). So it makes sense to go with the flow and continue to use the term.
Indeed I've done so in my own weblog categorisation, which mostly matches the
community topic mapping applications I use. It isn't my purpose here to try and
change the term 'knowledge management'. I do however want to try and grasp what
exactly is knowledge management and how is it done in the real world?

Is KM Nonsense?

I came across an interesting paper that debunks some myths about KM. Written
by Professor T.D. Wilson of the University of Sheffield, the paper is
provocatively entitled The
nonsense of 'knowledge management'. The professor researched journal papers
that had the term 'knowledge management' in their titles and he found that the
occurance of such papers grew exponentially from 1997 onward. His data takes us
to 2002, which was the peak but also showed signs of a slow-down. Professor
Wilson discovered the following tendencies among the journals he researched (nb:
I've separated the points into a numbered list):

1. A concern with information technology.

2. A tendency to elide the distinction between 'knowledge' (what I know) and
'information' (what I am able to convey about what I know).

3. Confusion of the management of work practices in the organization with the
management of knowledge.

The 3 things above aren't the Professor's conclusions, just an excerpt I've
selected that covers what I consider to be 3 key points. His actual conclusion
later in that paper is that KM is a "management fad, promulgated mainly by
certain consultancy companies". That may be so, but I'm more interested in
what KM is in practice in the business world.

Work Practices

I want to pick up on the third point from above, "management of work
practices in the organization". This is dismissed by Professor Wilson in
his conclusion as a "Utopian idea", but I believe it is a practical
way forward for KM. The current crop of personal content management and 'social
software' tools (weblogs, wikis, etc) go some way to giving individual workers
control over their information gathering and sharing. It's by no means a perfect
solution - I've
written before that I'm skeptical about how many 'normal' people (i.e.
non-geeks) will use these technologies. But even so, technologies such as
weblogs do emphasize subjectivity and context - which as I
mentioned at the beginning of this post are two main tenets of 'knowledge'.

Bottom-up KM

One of the best articles I've seen on KM was written a week or so ago by Dave
Pollard. He entitled it Confessions
of a CKO: What I should have done. As the title indicates, Dave used to be a
"Chief Knowledge Officer" (at Ernst & Young I think? if so, then
it's one of the consultancy firms that Professor Wilson picked on in his
paper!). In a previous article, Dave had outlined
his principles of KM and in this latest article he tackles the processes.
They are grounded in the following observation:

"...I realized that we have been looking at it all wrong, from above,
from a systems perspective, instead of from ground level, from an activity
level."

Which is another of saying that KM should be bottom-up, rather than top-down
- a theme that I've
written on before (as have many others in the blogging world).

KM Job Description

What really grabbed me about Dave's article was his ideal "job
description" for KM - or "Work Effectiveness Improvement" as he
re-named it. He outlined 6 bullet points and I've decided to crudely cut out the
action points from those, which ironically loses the context somewhat. But
generally speaking there are far too few KM action points in the world
(as opposed to reams and reams of KM theory). So here goes:

5. Assess the aggregate cost to the organization of information; and
objectively evaluate information adequacy, quality, and overload, and recommend
changes to tools, repositories, and processes.

6. Develop a set of Work Effectiveness Principles.

Summary

The key point I take away from Dave Pollard's article and Professor Wilson's
paper is that Knowledge Management isn't just a term to be used and abused in
management meetings and journal papers. Knowledge Management - despite being
mis-named - is a personal, collaborative, active 'doing word'. It is founded on subjectivity and context.

Let me put it this way: Knowledge Management should be a verb,
not (as the word 'management' implies) a noun.

Our jobs as KM researchers or practitioners is to enable that in
organizational settings. Now... if only I could get such a job! I'm currently a
Web Producer, but I much prefer working at the Analysis and Strategy level. So
I'd be interested to know how Dave Pollard worked his way to be a CKO, as that's
something I'd like to aim towards.

Your 2 Cents

I'd be interested in feedback from readers as
to how one gets a job in the KM area. Do you work as a KM [something]? What do
you do in your job to enable 'knowledge management'?

I've begun the push to introduce wiki and weblog technologies into the company I work for. As I wrote in my last post, I'm aiming to enhance Information Flow within my company. There is some initial skepticism from my colleagues about wikis and weblogs, but mainly due to unfamiliarity with these tools. For example, one concern is of the unstructured nature of Wikis when compared to the highly-structured nature of Content Management Systems. Wikis and Weblogs are often seen by people as being replacements for Content Management and Document Management Systems. And in a sense it is a choice between two types of Knowledge Management: Bottom-Up (wikis/weblogs) vs Top-Down (CMS's, Doc Mgmt). But right now I see wikis/weblogs as being complimentary to CMS's and Doc Mgmt systems - not replacements. There is still a need for structured information in a corporate setting and probably there always will be, but what wikis and weblogs potentially bring to the table is collaboration and a publish-subscribe culture.

Having said that, there's no doubt that wikis/weblogs would be much stronger technologies if we could discover how to add layers of structure to the information that we produce using these tools. But that's when the Semantic Web looms into view like a giant blimp and techies start throwing 3-letter acronyms at each other like paper airplanes. Long story short: when the day arrives that we able to structure Web information from the bottom-up in a practical and user-friendly manner, that's when wikis and weblogs may begin to replace CMS's and Doc Mgmt systems.

All this doesn't stop us from implementing wikis and weblogs now as tools to foster collaboration and easy information publishing. That's basically what I'm aiming to achieve at my company. Today I had a look at Twiki and I came across this excellent presentation by Twiki creator Peter Thoeny, which he made to LinuxWorld on 21 Jan 2004. There's a lot of great advice in this presentation, but the things I want to highlight are his views on Knowledge Management. He makes the point that Knowledge Management is typically viewed as "control over content" and this is what conventional CMS's aim to achieve. He argues that knowledge cannot be managed, it can only be enabled. This is a point that resonates with me, because I think that "knowledge" is subjective and therefore cannot be 'captured' as an objective entity. Information can be captured though - and that's where wikis and weblogs come in. They enable anyone and everyone to capture (write down) information. Knowledge needs context - the reader's.

This is all fine and dandy in theory, but the practical reality is I have to convince my company that wikis and/or weblogs are a viable KM solution. A lot of people still subscribe to the "top-down" approach of KM. With regard to Intranets, the top-down approach says that Intranet content needs to be controlled. That there needs to be a gatekeeper or webmaster who decides what is appropriate for publishing and what is not. Of course, I don't agree with this approach - this weblog isn't called Read/Write Web for nothing! To my way of thinking everyone has the right and ability to not just consume information, but produce it too. And this is the fundamental benefit that wikis and weblogs provide. The question is: are corporates ready for the read/write culture, or is the need to control information going to remain for a while yet? I'm asking this question in the context of a corporate Intranet, but it's the exact same question being asked of journalism, politics, marketing weblogs, book publishing, music, etc etc.

All in all, my colleagues were open to using wikis and weblogs - as long as they're targeted at the right problem and to the right audience. That is, ordinary people must be motivated to use the tools ("passionate" is a word that was used) and it must be a suitable context. For example, a Wiki could be used to enable communication between teams, as an alternative to team members using email to send and store work-related information. My colleagues are enthusiastic (albeit slightly skeptical) about me testing out these technologies and seeing what evolves. I'll let you know how it goes!

Dina Mehta wrote today about implementing Weblog, Wiki, IM, and other collaboration technologies into an Intranet environment, to replace an "archaic" Knowledge Management system and improve inter-office communication. I'm embarking on similar activities with the company I work for, so I'm eagar to read about others experiences. In my work, I've made a couple of proposals to IT mgmt about using weblog and wiki technologies. They seem interested, so I'm now going to set up some test runs using open source technology. I've got my eye on Twiki as an Intranet-focused wiki and Movable Type as an extensible weblog system. I'll be writing about my experiments with these two products in the future, because I'm as curious as everybody else how "normal people" will react to this technology in a corporate setting. Especially as I not only have to convince business people, but IT people too.

Dina also adds, about KM in general:

I'm not sure this fits into traditional definitions of Knowledge Management (i really dislike the term) - i wish someone would coin a really neat term for it.

I feel the same about the phrase "Knowledge Management". To me, KM is full of fluffy words and phrases that have little practical value in the real world. It's too easy for so-called "Knowledge Management Consultants" to swan into organisations and pontificate about leveraging 'this' and setting up processes for 'that'. It's all so top-down, all talk and no action. The thing I like about wikis and weblogs is that it's bottom-up, there are no rules or processes or KM systems trying to pen workers in like sheep. KM is like a sheepdog and KM Consultants are the Shepherds. Except the 'sheep' are actually people, not sheep, so they resist herding.

With wikis and weblogs, people can just click a button and type (notice I said 'can' - it remains to be seen whether they actually do). People can produce information, subscribe to information they value, edit each others information. It's like a flow of information and Knowledge gets created in the mix and mingle of it all.

Information Flow is the term I suggested to Dina to replace Knowledge Management. It's not an original term, I've heard people like Dave Wineruse it. Information Flow is what wikis and weblogs enable. To "manage" knowledge suggests a top-down approach where we get to tell Knowledge what to do. Well guess what, knowledge can't be ordered around. Information routes itself around of its own free will. What's more, Knowledge is in the eye of the beholder - i.e. it's a Subjective thing, not Objective. Am I mixing my metaphors? Sorry, it is late on a Friday...

Hey, maybe I can style myself as an "Information Flow Consultant" :-) I'll get the business card made up on Monday morning!

Thought a) Some people post too much. Recently I subscribed to 7 Journalist Bloggers - 6 of them post too many items, so I've fallen behind already. One of them has 81 unread items sitting in my RSS Aggregator and it's only 3 or so days worth. It's too much! I don't have the motivation to catch up, so I will probably unsubscribe from most of those Journo bloggers. The 1 Journo blogger whose quantity I can keep up with is Jay Rosen, who posts 1 or 2 long essays per week. That's more my style.

Thought b) Robert Scoble has admitted he's a "Blog Addict". He's taking a 1-week holiday from blogging to clear his mind. While I'm not on the same scale as Robert, I have to admit also that my blogging is beginning to become all-consuming for me. The positives: I'm actively writing and generating ideas because of blogging, I'm watching less tv and reading newspapers less, I'm interacting on an intellectual level with people from all over the world. The negatives: family time does suffer, I'm reading less 'real' books, there are too many interesting things to keep up with and so one tends to lose focus.

Thought c) Will blogging ever be anything but an "online diary" to Normal People? I'd like to think it will hit it big sometime soon, but let's face it - we're a minority (or is it a cult?).

Thought d) Does Location matter more than than The Blogosphere would like to think it does? Is blogging too American-centric? I live in New Zealand, so I don't get to attend any of the blog conventions, blogger lunches, etc. And I do feel like I'm missing out on something. e.g. nobody sent me an invitation to Orkut (it's invitation only). I'm probably not interested in Orkut anyway, but it did make me wonder if living in New Zealand is affecting my ability to actively participate in the blogosphere.

Thought f) I keep thinking about my Microcontent Wiki idea, which really revolves around trying to keep up with conversations and aiming for a sense of permanance to them which is missing. e.g. when is the tipping point for when blog conversations (via the comments sections on peoples blogs) peter out? Sometimes I want to go back to a conversation two months later and re-start it, but I know that no one apart from the original author will be notified and so the momentum of the original conversation is never regained. We need places where ideas can reside and continue being debated for all time. Wikis are the right tools for this, mostly. Except they aren't good at the Subscribe part of the PubSub equation. And Wikis to me don't have the same personal touch of weblogs - Wikis ain't Avatars. (this thought is inspired by Erik's interesting post about effectiveness, which has got my brain spinning - but I don't know that I'll have anything further to contribute until a few days, when the conversation will probably be finished).

Thought g) Attention. Where do I start with this one... Pick me, pick me. It may be a democracy of ideas, but sometimes it feels like a Horserace (in the American politics sense of the word).

These are just Saturday Morning thoughts, before the real day starts. Ah, my daughter's just woken up and needs my attention :-)

One of my 12 main categories for this weblog is Corporate Weblogging. I recently wrote my category headings in the form of a manifesto, so here is how I actually phrased it: "Weblog technology can be used to enhance Corporate/Business communications and KM."

Thus far I haven't written much on this theme, but it's something that's been percolating and bubbling away in my brain over the past year or so. It's a very important subject to me, because I'm keen to marry my interest in weblogging technologies to my day job. If my life was an XML file, then my goal with blogging would be to do an XSLT transfer from Amateur to Professional. It's that old maxim about getting paid for what you love doing. I'd dearly love to get paid to develop weblogs, but realistically the only way for me to do that is to introduce weblogging and similar technologies (such as Wikis) to my company.

My day job is Web Producer in a medium-sized New Zealand company. I've come to the conclusion that there is potential for weblogging technology to be used at my workplace, on our Intranet in particular. The company I work for is very project-oriented, as opposed to being run by a bunch of middle managers. This type of culture, I believe, could take advantage of weblog technologies internally to disseminate project and other business information. There are many advantages to a project-oriented culture - e.g. it's a flat hierarchy and so it's more dynamic and responsive to change, kind of like the Web in fact. However one of the disadvantages of a project-oriented workplace is that information stays within silos. One project team often won't know what another project team is doing, even though there may be a lot of knowledge they could share that would be mutually beneficial and therefore benefit the company as a whole.

So I've taken it upon myself to try and kick-start some weblogging and wiki initiatives in my company, to get information flowing like it should. I'm an established personal blogger now, and one of only two people in my company who even knows what weblogging is, so I'm in a unique position to begin implementing weblog technologies in 'the real world'. Of course there's still the issue that 'normal people' have no interest in writing. As Nova Spivack memorably put it recently: "I like blogging. Everyone I know likes blogging. But let's face it, we are all a bunch of geeks."

Nevertheless, corporate blogging has potential. I forsee weblogging and wiki technologies will be most useful in enabling bottom-up Knowledge Management in my company - via our Intranet.

Looking around the Web, it's quite hard to find practical information on using weblog technology in a corporate setting. What I have found so far seems to be mostly related to using weblogs as an external marketing tool. For example, Dina Mehta pointed to a Microsoft Marketing manager who uses blogging to converse with his customers. That's great, but external blogging isn't suitable for the place I work for. You really need to have a significant proportion of customers/clients who are both tech-savvy and motivated to use the Web regularly, in order to achieve anything with external blogging. So the internal Intranet is where I must focus my attention.

Keith Robinson regularly writes about using weblogging technology on his company's intranet. He uses Movable Type for parts of his employer's Intranet. I've found Keith's articles to be very useful and relevant to me - check out a recent article from him that describes how he implemented MT for a Policies & Procedures website. Using weblog tools as an easy-to-use and adaptable Content Management System is one way to introduce blogging into corporations. DL Byron notes:

"I'm consulting for a large corporation and it's fascinating to watch my peers embrace blogs and blogging. They're still working out how to use them internally, but have had success externally and I expect the same. Besides the communication within teams, I'm trying to help them understand the simple content management aspect of blogging."

I agree that success in corporate blogging has been mainly with external customer-facing blogs, and mostly sales and technology-oriented ones at that. Also don't forget about people like Robert Scoble, who is pushing the boundaries between personal/corporate blogging. His opinions are his own and he doesn't speak for Microsoft, yet he is quite obviously hyping his employer for all it's worth on his blog. His readers push back too, which is a sign of Robert's success and perhaps points the way forward for Political Candidates - involve your audience, engage them in conversations.

Today Digital Web asked "Is it year of the blog for corps?" I think it may be the year that internal company blogging begins to gain traction. My own corporate blogging efforts will probably be in the Knowledge Management arena - my users will be employees rather than customers. Plus my company already has an easy-to-use Content Management system for the Intranet, so I don't need to use weblog tools as a CMS.

I see that the upcoming SXSW (South by Southwest Interactive Festival) will have a panel called "Blogging for Business", featuring Keith Robinson and DL Byron. I'd love to go along to that, however I'll be stuck on the other side of the world. Hopefully someone does a write-up of it.

Summary: I analyse a 1994 Personal Information Management program and compare its goals to what we want in in a similar tool in 2004. I discover the requirements are basically the same.

The blogosphere is mostly a synchronous give-and-take of content. People largely comment on and link to things that other people are commenting on and linking to. It's a circular flow of information, with a particular point in time always at the epicentre. It's why 99% of weblogs are primarily ordered chronologically - with the most recent post at the top of the page.

When I'm looking for information to quench my insatiable thirst for knowledge, I often use the Web in an asynchronous manner. That is, I like to read historical web documents and compare them to current blogosphere memes. The Wayback Machine is my friend in this regard. Why, just last week I discovered a gem of historical Web documentation: the Electronic Proceedings of the Second World Wide Web Conference '94: Mosaic and the Web. This is a record of all the presentations made to the 2nd annual WWW conference back in 1994. I intend to browse through most of the presentations in due course, but for now I want to tell you about the first one that tickled my Interest gland.

The increasing complexity of navigating the Internet is becoming one of the fundamental obstacles to its effective use. This is due to the nature of the Internet, principally, a disorganized collection of both sites and site documents whose exponential growth rate rapidly is outstripping any user's ability to master it. There are two ways to deal with this complexity: reorganize the structure of the Internet or give each user the ability to organize an individual perspective of the Internet. Although the former would produce more global benefit, the latter is both easier to accomplish and potentially more beneficial to any individual or group of users.

Our approach, therefore, is to create a navigation tool which copes with Internet complexity at the individual, rather than the organizational, level. This tool, PAINT (Personalized, Adaptive Internet Navigation Tool), allows the user to impose a hierarchical organization on Internet sites and documents of interest by creating categories under which to group sites. Such categorization can be used not only by an individual user, but also can be shared among groups of users with similar interests. PAINT will also provide local automatic classification based on user parameters and user behavior. That is, PAINT will record visited locations and categorize them according to past use. The user is then free to examine the automated organization, modify it, and make it a personalized view of the Internet. In our report, we will describe the PAINT tool, its use, and some preliminary investigations of local, automatic categorization.

This webpage, even though nearly 10 years old, still in a nutshell describes what we're looking for in a PIM (Personal Information Management) appliance circa 2004. You can get all fancy and talk about wanting agents to gather data automatically, or using Bayesian filters, or latent semantic indexing. But really it still boils down to this: we want a tool that (in the words of Paint) individualizes the Web.

Take the following sentence from the first paragraph in that 1994 webpage. It outlines the central problem - complexity - and the two general solutions. In red type, I've added how these two solutions are (generally speaking) being approached now:

There are two ways to deal with this complexity: reorganize the structure of the Internet(2004 = the Semantic Web) or give each user the ability to organize an individual perspective of the Internet(2004 = bootstrapping; eg what tech bloggers are now trying to do with their weblog taxonomies).

The program PAINT was designed to take the second approach. Paint wanted to put the user at the centre of their own personal Web:

This tool, PAINT (Personalized, Adaptive Internet Navigation Tool), allows the user to impose a hierarchical organization on Internet sites and documents of interest by creating categories under which to group sites.

The key things to note: PAINT enables people to create a hierarchical organization for their information, by grouping items into categories. Hmm, sound familiar?

PAINT circa 1994 was first of all an extension of the Mosaic web browser's hotlist facility. Hotlists were the equivalent of Favourites in the modern IE browser, or Bookmarks in Netscape. But at the time, hotlists could not be organized into folders. You just had the one list of documents and websites. So it could be argued that PAINT was simply a description of what IE Favorites or Netscape Bookmarks became a couple of years later - a hierarchical set of folders with which to store website URLs.

But I think PAINT's goals were deeper than that. Look at your usage of Favorites or Bookmarks today - do you use them as a way to categorize information you find on the Web? Do you organize your information into a hierarchy using the folders available to you? If you're like me, once upon a time you made an effort to do all this, but it long ago fell by the wayside. With the advent of RSS and Google I hardly ever use my IE Favorites anymore! And yet we still have this over-riding need to organize our information on the Web...

But obviously I can only take a comparison of PIM requirements then (1994) and now (2004) so far. What's different now? For a start we've had an exponential increase in the amount of data and information on the Web, thanks in part to having weblog tools that allow anyone (technical or no) to publish on the Web. But perhaps more fundamentally, information on the Web is now published as "microcontent". Information exists in "chunks", and each chunk of information is defined with a permalink. True, we haven't yet reached the stage where individual paragraphs or even sentences are given permalinks - but maybe that world of data isn't too far off.

So, could PAINT - or more likely a PAINT boosted with 2004-era technologies - be used to help us build weblog taxonomies based on categorizing our content hierachically? Well yes, but we're already building such tools. Dave Winer has developed a product called Channel Z which categorizes weblog posts into categories created by the author. k-collector allows bloggers to create and post to categories in a shared directory. And some clever bloggers (eg Paul Ford, Erik Benson, Bill Seitz) have created their own automated back-linking categorizing extravaganzas. So we're moving towards the goals that PAINT (and others I'm sure) defined back in 1994, and that visionaries such as Ted Nelson and Vannevar Bush defined decades before that. We haven't got there yet though. Most of us still muddle our way manually organizing our Web content. PIM Nirvana hasn't yet been developed. But with initiatives such as Chandler taking over the mantle from PAINT as the next big thing of PIMs, the circle of Web innovation continues and the dream lives on. Everybody wants to control and be at the centre of their information environment - will we ever succeed?

I've just returned from 4 days holiday. I was disconnected from the Web for the entire time. This was a good thing, as I spent lots of quality time with my family. Now I'm back sitting in front of my PC at home. I've spent the last hour reviewing stuff in my RSS Aggregator. But with 4 days worth of updates to dig through, I've barely made a dent in clearing out my RSS Aggregator! So rather than totally swamp my mind with new data, I decided to take the plunge and click the Mark All Read button. It's a drastic move I know, but it's the only way to keep my holiday clearheadedness intact. Plus, do I really want to engage myself in the RSS-Data debate? That's a rhetorical question ;-)

And that's probably just the tip of the iceberg. I haven't even mentioned other popular forms of information management like Instant Messaging or Skype, neither of which I use. The point of all this is that I have too many data platforms. What I'd like to do is reduce it down to 4-5 key platforms. Solutions?

Erik Benson posits a "universal text box", which would be a one-size-fits-all writing tool. Whether you're entering a weblog entry, an email, a search query, a photo, a comment on someone else's blog post, a ping to a server - it all gets put in the "universal text box". This is a variation on one of my favourite themes: the Universal Canvas. To me it would be a dream web application. The nightmare scenario, however, is that Microsoft are already building it and it's called Longhorn :-0

Erik concludes that to make a universal text box, we'll need to reduce and consolidate in terms of functionality and features:

"I'd like to create a catalog of different ways that people can currently write to the web (web forms on a zillion different sites, all ignorant of one another, various desktop applications, all saying the same thing in a slightly different way) and find the lowest common denominator. It's good that so much exploration has happened (that's the benefit of allowing innovation to occur in a distributed fashion) but I think innovation in the "write to the web" action is going to have to go through a couple steps of choice reduction and consolidation before we fully cross the chasm."nb: emphasis mine

This is pretty much what I want to do in my own personal world of information. I want to pare down my data platforms to the bare minimum. I want 4-5 platforms maximum, which could be the following:

Ideally I'd like to have just one app: one tool that rules them all. Not everyone would agree with me though. Andrew Chen is one person who believes we need specialist tools. Andrew writes:

"We need to make things "fun" for people to enter in the necessary MetaData in order for things to work. And to do so, we need more than just some generic one-size fits all data-entry method. That's why I think we'll need speciallized tools for each type of "fun" meta-data that people might want to enter."

I appreciate what Andrew is driving at and I agree it is fun to play with all the new Web toys that come out. But on the other hand... the amount of choice in web applications these days gives me a headache. There are just too many tools for a single human to grok. For example, every time I go to the Mozilla Projects webpage I feel a tremendous pressure of information... like a dam that's near bursting. Or when I go to the W3C site, I'm battered by giant waves of protocols and standards. Or when I go to SourceForge.net, I'm soon engulfed by the flow of web apps.

Yes I would be much happier with less information, less tools. It's why I'm so fond of the humble Web Browser, which is the nearest thing we have to a Universal Information Application. Sure it's not perfect, it's not a "smart" client. But hey, we can write in it. We can read in it. We can plug things into it (like Flash, or the latest Laszlo app). The Web Browser will suffice for me thanks... at least until Erik builds the Universal Text Box, in which case I want one ;-)

Gerry McGovern: "The Web may have been the almost exclusive domain of techies. Today, it is increasingly the domain of communicators."

Bill Gates: "Whether it's handling a classified ad or handling editorials, the authoring tools for these things no longer require an IT department to be involved. The actual tools that the reporters, the managers are working with can understand XML."

Matthew Berk: "In five years, content management functionality will move in two directions: out to the desktop in the form of software like Office 11, and down to the infrastructure in the form of file systems that implement the essentials now seen in content management packages."

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The quote below from Dan Gillmor doesn't obviously seem to fit under the topic of "content management". But think about why Google bought Blogger:

Google = Read; Blogger = Write.

Read + Write (seamlessly) = the future of Content Management

Dan Gillmor, writing about Blogger and Google: "The first order of business for Evan Williams and his team was to upgrade the blog-posting software, and to put the Blogger-hosted weblogs on Google's more reliable server computers. But Williams said the team is also looking hard at the element of the read-write Web that Google does so well -- finding stuff."

"...a company's Intranet would be better served as more of an enterprise-wide, network-enabled application than anything resembling a Web site or Web application."

It seems likely that content management systems will over time integrate with office systems. Products like Microsoft's upcoming Office 11 promise to be fully XML-compatible. You will be able to save any Office document (Word, Excel, etc) as an XML file, which will add structure and portability to office data. These days Content Management systems are usually based on XML, so it could be said that office systems are just beginning to catch up. However the main difference between most CM systems today and what Office 11 will offer, is that CM systems are web-based.

So will Intranets become more of an office application than a web one? Needs more thought...but right now I like to think Intranets will remain web-based. We are only just beginning to scratch the surface of web publishing. Weblogs, RSS syndication, XML technologies such as XSLT, and web services are just some of the exciting things that can be implemented on a web-based Intranet. Plus browsers aren't dead yet - they haven't even got to the read/write stage yet ;-)